For an Arab-Hebrew Workers Republic!
For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

Behind
all the talk of non-existent cease-fires, the sudden trips by top U.S.
officials
to the Near East and Israeli calls to “remove” (assassinate) Yasir
Arafat lies
the fact that the Zionist leaders are systematically gearing up to
launch a
full-scale attack on Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA was
the
make-believe government set up in the Occupied Territories by the 1993
Oslo
“peace” accord in order to police the Arab masses and put an end to the
first intifada
(uprising), that had lasted from 1988. With the outbreak of
the second intifada
last September, the Israeli rulers of all parties concluded that there
was
little point in maintaining the charade of Palestinian autonomy. With
the Oslo
“peace process” dead, many asked, what is to replace it? The answer is:
war,
more specifically an expansionist war to carve up “the Territories,”
definitively incorporating large chunks of “Judea and Samaria,” and to
dismantle the PA, which has “outlived its usefulness” to the Zionists.

For
this move toward realizing Greater Israel they elected war criminal
Ariel
Sharon, the general whose specialty is “creating facts on the ground.”
“King
Arik,” as his supporters call him, was certainly not brought in to
negotiate
anything. The attacks on the Arab population have steadily escalated as
the
Israeli “Defense” Force locks down every Palestinian city and town,
ringing
them with barbed wire and tanks. Attacks by fascistic settlers have
grown
increasingly brazen as they set up scores of “advance posts” on
hilltops
throughout the West Bank. The Zionist “peace bloc” has dwindled to the
point of
disappearance, and the cries for war from Sharon’s nearly all-party war
cabinet
have been growing louder. The Israeli press is full of references to a
“second
war of independence,” among other things to solidify the loyalties of
large
numbers of Russian immigrants who missed out on the first one in 1948.
But for
all the Israeli muscle-flexing, the consequences of such a war are
unpredictable.

Class-conscious
working people around the world must defend the oppressed Palestinian
people
against the Zionist oppressors, all the more so in an outright war. It
is
necessary to prepare now to mobilize working-class power against
Israel’s
imperialist allies. The
idea that
the NATO chiefs who bombed Belgrade and Baghdad could or would somehow
pressure
Israeli warmongers into making concessions is a dangerous illusion.
Calls for
United Nations or European Union “observers” are worse than useless:
they will
duly observe Israeli expansion, as UN “blue helmets” and EU police have
done in
Lebanon and in Hebron. While European “statesmen” and Bushwhackers in
Washington may take exception to this or that provocation by Sharon’s
gang,
they are all complicit in the subjugation of the Palestinians through
the phony
“peace process” – as well as supplying billions of dollars worth of
weaponry
used to mutilate and murder unarmed Arab protesters, mainly children.
Nor are
the Arab rulers – oil sheiks, imperialist-created monarchs and
nationalist
colonels – any friends of the Palestinians. Long before King Hussein’s
1970
Black September slaughter in Jordan and the 1980s war on refugee camps
in
Lebanon, already in 1948 the Arab League participated in the carving up
of
Palestine.

The
political bankruptcy of Arab nationalism and liberal/reformist pressure
politics has been demonstrated through decades of suffering at the
hands of the
Zionist butchers. The fight to defend the beleaguered Palestinian
population
requires internationalist struggle against all the capitalist
governments, both
the “democratic” imperialists and their semicolonial satraps.
Centrally, what’s
needed is a struggle to shatter Israel from within, by winning Hebrew
working
people to break from Zionism and join with their Palestinian class
brothers and
sisters in a common struggle for proletarian revolution. So long as
capitalism
remains, the intractable national conflicts between two peoples
occupying the
same territory, sandwiched into a tiny corner of the Near East with few
resources, can only lead to endless slaughter. Communist
revolutionaries fight
for an Arab-Hebrew workers republic, insisting that a just resolution
of the
right to self-determination of all the peoples of the region can only
come
about through a socialist federation of the Near East.

Israeli
Provocation Sets Off Explosion of Palestinian Anger

The
way the events in Palestine are presented in the Western bourgeois
media is
insidiously slanted toward the Zionists, even when even-handedly
talking of an
“Arab-Israeli conflict” as if it’s a matter of a neighborhood quarrel
when in
fact the Israeli army is an occupying force suppressing the Arab
population.
Arafat is accused of fostering terrorism while the Israeli armed forces
are
engaged in a systematic program of assassinating Palestinian militants
(called
“directed killing” in the Zionist double-speak). Palestinian youth are
accused
of “breaking the cease-fire” for throwing stones and firing a few
rounds at the
tanks that come crashing into their towns, destroying homes and killing
kids.

In reality, the recent
chain of
events has been set off by Israeli provocations. First, then prime
minister
Ehud Barak of the thoroughly bourgeois “Labor” Party broke off the Camp
David
negotiations, demanding that the Palestinians agree to give up all of
Jerusalem
as the “eternal capital” of Israel and the incorporation into the
Zionist state
of huge blocs of settlements that would carve up the West Bank to
pieces,
making a mockery of a Palestinian statelet. Then, blaming Arafat for
the
breakdown of talks, Barak authorized the provocatively staged “visit”
of
Sharon, the butcher of the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila,
to
stride across the Islamic holy site of Haram al-Sharif in the company
of the
entire leadership of the right-wing Likud party and guarded by an army
more
than 3,000 Israel troops and cops. The result: Intifada 2.

Now
Sharon and his gang of “hawks” are in office, vowing to undo the entire
framework of a “negotiated settlement.” Never having supported the Oslo
accords
in the first place, they want to get rid of any hint of “restraint” on
Zionist
power. Deliberately assassinating scores of Palestinian leaders, using
anti-personnel bombs in populated areas, firing tank shells into
apartment
buildings, razing Palestinian homes in Jerusalem and sharply expanding
the West
Bank and Gaza “settlements” (in reality, military outposts populated by
fascistic ultra-Zionists), they are gearing up for an all-out assault
on the
territories. Newspapers publish the order of battle, listing the
locations,
personnel and armament of the different PA police forces.

The
head of Israeli military intelligence, General Amos Malka, and other
top
officials have made it clear that they are going after Arafat. The
chairman of
the Palestinian Authority has “completed his historic mission,” said
Defense
Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor), reports the liberal daily Ha’aretz
(8
June), and even if Arafat “has not (at least for the time being) been
targeted”
for “removal” they are preparing the groundwork. In the same issue, the
paper’s
military expert Ze’ev Schiff complains that the “attrition ratio” is
going
against Israel, having fallen from ten Palestinian deaths for every
Israeli
killed at the beginning of the intifada to only 4:1 in May.
Columnist
Doron Rosenblum writes:

“The fact is there is
general agreement here that a massive terrorist attack, perpetrated by
a lone
individual – on the scale of the Dolphi-Disco massacre – constitutes an
almost
automatic cause for activating the Air Force and moving masses of
armored and infantry
units for the conquest of territories: in short, of a war that could
become a
general regional conflagration.”

A writer in Yedioth
Ahronoth (8 June) said that the barrage of threats “is to prepare
public
opinion, in Israel and around the world, for a large-scale military
operation
that will topple the Palestinian Authority and lead to Arafat’s
expulsion.”

The
right-wingers in Sharon’s cabinet are most vociferously calling to
“unleash”
the military, but they aren’t the ones. Reputed Labor Party “dove”
Shimon
Peres, who in the 1970s oversaw the beginning of the West Bank
settlements,
approved the use of American-supplied F-16 fighter jets to bomb PA
installations in the wake of the June 1 suicide bombing. Washington
heard the
war drums and hurriedly dispatched CIA chief George Tenet and U.S.
secretary of
state Colin Powell to cool things out. But the “cease-fire” lasted
“about as
long as the secretary of state’s return flight to Washington on June
30th,” as
the London Economist (5 July) noted. The very next day Israeli
troops
shot two leaders of the Islamic group Hamas in an ambush, while a
rocket attack
by an Israeli helicopter killed two members of Islamic Jihad. In
reality,
Israeli leaders shot down the cease-fire with this provocation. The
response came
quickly, in the form of a new car bombing inside Israel.

The
issue of the “settlers” in the Occupied Territories is a key question.
For
decades after Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan
Heights in the
1967 “Six-Day War,” the U.S., UN and virtually every international body
formally considered the settlements illegal. but the signature of the
Oslo
accords by Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization in effect
legalized these
military outposts, and the number of settlers doubled (going from
100,000 to
200,000 during the seven-year “peace process”). The report by former
U.S.
Democratic senator George Mitchell called only for a halt to new
settlement
construction as part of a plan to stop Palestinian protests. Israel,
the PA and
the Bush admin­istration in Washington have all formally endorsed
the Mitchell
Report. But Sharon thumbed his nose even at this empty gesture by
authorizing
700 new housing units on the West Bank, in addition to the 6,000
already under
construction. Rather than these diplomatic sops, it’s necessary to
demand all
Israeli forces (including troops and “settlers”) out of the Occupied
Territories.

The
settlers should be driven out by militant action of the oppressed
Palestinian
population. This could gain considerable support from Hebrew working
people in
Israel, who widely despise the Uzi-toting religious fanatics and racist
terrorists. The bomb attack on the Dolfinarium randomly cut down
Israeli youths
dancing at the disco club, expressing the outlook of the Islamic
fundamentalists
for whom any Jew is a military target and an enemy to be expelled from
Palestine. Secular Palestinian nationalists have also engaged in
indiscriminate
bomb attacks, and driven to desperation by the occupation a large
percentage of
the Arab population approves of “martyrs’ actions.” Such actions
against
non-military targets help the Israeli rulers’ drive to produce
monolithic
Zionist “national unity.” But those who would win Israeli workers, both
Hebrew
and Arab, to defend the Palestinian people seek to drive a wedge to
split
Zionist Israel along its numerous fault lines, putting forward a
program of
internationalist class struggle.

For
many Israelis, the settlers represent a future as a perpetual garrison
state
doomed to be forever at war with its neighbors and subject populations.
There
was no outpouring of sympathy when Benjamin Kahane, leader of the
fascist Kach
group and son of Meir Kahane, and his wife were killed by a sniper
squad in the
West Bank. Good riddance, many rightly felt. Meanwhile, underground
Zionist
terrorist groups are growing, with tacit support and sometimes direct
participation by the state. Almost all the fascistic clots are members
of the
military reserves, receiving training and weapons from the army and
police.
Fascistic settler groups have carried out numerous attacks on
Palestinians,
including in Hebron last month. Watching Zionist toughs throwing stones
at the
Hassan Bek mosque in the wake of the disco bombing, one of their ilk
expressed
their Hitlerite mentality, “The terrorists have to be destroyed, just
like the
Nazis did to the Jews.” Such murderous scum should be swept off the
streets by
teams of anti-Zionist Hebrew and Arab workers and youths.

For
Proletarian Internationalism!

With
the Israeli military machine revving its engines, just about anything
could
become the causus belli, an incident that becomes the
ostensible cause
for a war, just as the murder of an Israeli diplomat in London
(possibly with
Mossad involvement) served as the pretext for Menachem Begin’s 1982
invasion of
Lebanon commanded by Sharon. A gruesome fascist attack on Arabs like
the 1994
slaughter of 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in
Hebron by
Kahane disciple Baruch Goldstein, of the ultra-rightist Kiryat Arba
settlement,
could set off a chain reaction. But at present, fascistic elements see
no need
for a new Jewish terrorist underground as in the 1980s because the
Israeli army
with its assassination squads is carrying out their dirty work. Yet the
army is
having difficulties. The number of reservists failing to report for
duty in the
Occupied Territories has reached record numbers. Meanwhile, the New
York
Times (6 June) reports that the intifada together with the
U.S.
recession have sent Israel’s economy into a tailspin. Industrial
production is
at a standstill, hotels are closing, airline bookings have cratered,
leading to
hundreds of layoffs. Banks reported steep losses and the gross domestic
product
plummeted by 12 percent in the fourth quarter of 2000.

Israel
is not a monolith, contrary to the view of both Zionist and Arab
nationalists,
but a class society with deep divisions. Many mizrahim (Jews of
eastern
origin) are still beset by low wages and relegated to miserable
“development
towns”; Russian immigrants (some Jews, many not) are routinely assigned
to West
Bank settlements, constantly fearing Palestinian attacks; the large
secular
majority and Orthodox religious communities are often at each others’
throats.
Moreover, one-fifth of the population of the “Jewish state” is Arab,
and tens
of thousands of foreign workers have been brought in from Romania, Sri
Lanka
and elsewhere as the supply of Palestinian labor has been cut off by
the
military lockdown on the Occupied Territories. But it may take external
events
to crack Zionist domination, including a drawn-out military
hemorrhaging as in
Lebanon. The Zionists, like the German imperialists in two world wars,
like Blitzkriegs,
lightning strikes that are over in a week and let the soldiers brag
about their
exploits for decades afterwards. Long-term attrition as in Lebanon and
the two intifadas
is decidedly less popular in this country.

Palestinian
Arabs and Israeli peace groups, most of them led by liberal Zionists,
are
acutely aware of the impact of international events on Israel. Their
focus,
however, is on pressuring the imperialists to pressure Israel. It was
widely
noted that as Israeli tanks were slicing through Gaza in May, with the
army
chief of staff vowing to stay indefinitely, a word from the Pentagon
was
sufficient to turn them around in an hour. But the U.S. and European
imperialists are closely allied with the Zionists, particularly through
the
liberal Democratic Israel lobby in Washington and the social-democratic
Second
International, of which the Israeli “Labor” party is a part. In fact,
the Bush
regime may have already given the go-ahead for an attack, just as
Ronald Reagan
and Alexander Haig gave a green light to the Lebanon invasion. Liberal
nationalist pressure politics will not save the Palestinians, and could
make
their situation worse. After months of appealing for European
intervention to
balance the pro-Israeli Americans, Arafat recently met with Germany’s
foreign
minister Joseph Fischer of the environmentalist Greens. The former New
Left
street fighter proceeded to give the PA chief a tongue-lashing.

Various
reformists and Palestine solidarity groups are currently pushing a
campaign to
try Sharon in a European court for war cimes, particularly over the
1982 Sabra
and Shatila massacre. They even got a Belgian court to take up the
case. Many
have illusions that he could be extradited to stand trial, as a Spanish
court
attempted with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. At a recent
demonstration in
New York City when Sharon attended a fund-raising event at the Hotel
Pierre,
protesters chanted “Indict Sharon!” Some also chanted “shame on the
U.S.” for
hosting a war criminal and even called on the New York Police
Department to
“Arrest Sharon!” Rudy Giuliani’s racist killer cops and the butchers of
Vietnam
and Korea are not about to arrest or indict Sharon, and calls on them
to do so
will only serve to legitimize the imperialists’ fraudulent posture as
“human
rights” defenders as they try their former allies like Serbia’s
Milosevic and
Panama’s Noriega in order to justify their own wars and invasions.

Trotskyists
look instead to the international working class to defend the
Palestinian Arab
people whose rights and lives have been trampled on by the Zionists’
jackboot.
The whole Oslo “peace” fraud was a product of the U.S.-dominated New
World
Order in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Defeats for
imperialism around the world will have a direct impact in the area. A
proletarian upheaval against the decrepit Arab regimes anywhere in the
Near
East would directly threaten both the Zionists and the Arab puppets of
imperialism. Even modest examples of joint Arab-Hebrew workers action
in
support of the besieged Palestinians could have a tremendous effect
throughout
the region. The key is to build a revolutionary leadership, with
multinational
Leninist-Trotskyist parties in Israel, the Occupied Territories and
throughout
the Near East, in the struggle to reforge the Fourth International as
the world
party of socialist revolution. n